It has not to this day, I think, occurred to Ezra Pound that the authentic revolutionary (not the revolutionary when everybody else is revolutionary, but the really sinister and uncommon fellow) will rebel against everything—not least rebellion. So I did not respond with a ready grin of satisfaction at this attribution of orthodox devilry.—Misunderstanding blocked the way from the start with us.
The third time (the meeeting occurred elsewhere) I answered the hail. A bombastic galleon, palpably bound to, or from, the Spanish Main. I thought I had better do so, since we were always meeting, and going on board, I discovered beneath its skull and cross-bones, intertwined with fleurs de lys and spattered with preposterous starspangled oddities, a heart of gold.
Under a skull and crossed lilies, a kind heart that the bogus coronet of Raoul de la Tour Carol made nonsense of. That is what I found. Also, through sailing the China Seas (without the shadow of an academic sanction) this literary pirate had become a very passable, if unsound, sinologue. And nature had endowed him with more native taste—how exquisite it can be I have only to refer to Cathay in order to confound dissent—than all the Cambridge aesthetes could muster between them.
I should say that was in 1910 though I have no calendar, engagement book, old letters—nothing to tell me what the year in fact was. And how I can possibly convey the atmosphere of the Vienna Cafe in 1910 I do not know. I have no historical competence, even for events within my own experience. How does one make visible a hansom-cab to a person who has never seen one?
It is twenty-five years ago but it seems at an infinite distance. And the flaunting young poet from the Middle West who nervously flung himself into it is of course obliterated by the more full-blown, more recent Ezra, whom I know far better.
At that period I was an idle student, nursing dreams of obstreperous intervention in a farce or two that was going on, upon the stage where the painters acted, and where the aesthetes blinked and blahed. I had written an essay, a story, and an article, about something or other, and had started one or two paintings (I never finished a painting till six months before the war and then it was not really more than a sketch). Outwardly, I have been told, I looked like a moujik : but if so it was a moujik who bought his clothes in Savile Row or Brook Street and his most eccentric shirts in the Burlington Arcade. If his shoes retained the loam of the wildest heaths discoverable at the time, they had been made for him in Jermyn Street. I had the tarnished polish of the English Public School, of the most gilded cafes of five or six continental capitals. And meanwhile I would lunch with an entertaining group of people who were mostly drawn from the official ranks of the great neighbouring Museum. With some afterwards I would dine in Old Compton Street. Mostly they were middle-aged scholars, with a distinguished elderly mandarin called Squire (no relation I think of 'Jack') and a few younger persons. Streatfield, a poet, who had been a friend of Samuel Buder's, was among them and his high crowning laugh partook of the orgasm. That laugh must later, when he lost his reason, have been found disturbing to his male attendant.
Yeats had sometimes been there but I had not met him yet. I have always thought that if instead of the really malefic 'Bloomsburies', who with their ambitious and jealous cabal have had such a destructive influence upon the intellectual life of England, something more like these Vienna Cafe habitues of those days could have been the ones to push themselves into power, that a less sordid atmosphere would have prevailed. The writing and painting world of London might have been less like the afternoon tea-party of a perverse spinster. But one cannot choose one's Government. And we have been governed, in matters of taste, by 'bloomsbury' aesthete-politicians for the two decades and a half that have elapsed since then, especially in the post-war.
It was announced one day that a certain Ezra Pound was to come in to lunch, a young American poet. I forget the circumstances and who had invited him, but I remember he was not a particularly welcome guest. Several of our party had already seen him. And it was reported that S. had pronounced him a Jew. S. had an excellent nose for Jews, it was claimed: he had a gift that enabled him to detect a Jew under almost any disguise—something like water-divining, a peculiar and uncanny gift. And S. had affirmed (and coming in at that moment S. confirmed it, with a dainty sideways nod—as he hung up his overcoat—of his large pink countenance, decorated with a powerful white moustache) that this 'young American poet' was undoubtedly a crypto-semite, of the diaspora of Wisconsin.
The newspapers did not resound with the embittered back-chat of Jews and Aryans, Jews and Arabs, Jews and Blackshirts, und so weiter, and there was no reason why I should take any particular interest in a Jew.
When Pound appeared I was mildly surprised to see an unmistakable 'nordic blond', with fierce blue eyes and a red-dishly hirsute jaw, thrust out with a thoroughly Aryan determination. But this moment of disillusion past, I took no further interest in this cowboy songster, said to be a young sprig of the Kahal. I turned my back: I heard the staccato of the States: I 'sensed' that there was litde enthusiasm. Most of those present felt that he was indeed a Jew, disguised in a tengallon hat, I later heard—a 'red Jew' it was decided, a subtle blend, but a pukka Kosher. And when I rose to go back to the Museum he had whirled off—bitterness in his heart, if I know my Ezra. This was his first taste of the English. He had no luck with the English, then or at a later date, and was always in this country the perfect fish out of water—hardly a Jewish trait!
I think I have some understanding of Ezra Pound, and of my good friends of that time, too. And I can see how impossible it was that they should take to him. It was not their fault entirely: but on their side they felt that this was a bogus personage and they had no inducement to be 'taken in' by this tiresome and flourishing foreign aspirant to poetic eminence. Loyalty to Shelley and Keats alone would have prevented it! And what held for the Vienna Cafe held for Oxford too, as he later discovered. I may add that they also disapproved of Americans. Then he left England in disgust and of course England was the poorer and Rapallo not very much the richer.
Pound approached these strangers as one might a panther, or any other dangerous quadruped—tense and wary, without speaking or smiling: showing one is not afraid of it, inwardly awaiting hostile action: But when it comes to his desire to impress, the panther image will no longer serve. For he did not desire to prove to the people he had come amongst that he was superior in physical strength, but that he was superior to all other intellectuals in intellect, and all poets in prosodic prowess. They were the spectators merely—they were of very little account. The feelings of dislike were mutual and immediate, as I could observe, and he never sought to hide the fact that he looked upon them as of very little consequence.
At the beginning in England Pound socially was a little too much like the 'singing cowboy'. He had rushed with all the raw solemnity of the classic Middle West into a sophisticated post-Nineties society dreaming of the Eighteenth century, discussing the quality of the respective cellars of the Oxford Colleges, calling their relatives' county palaces 'places' still droppin' their g's from time to time, for whom the spectacle of American 'strenuousness'—The Bull Moose tradition—was something that hardly any longer deserved a smile. They looked at it with a stony stare of infinite boredom.
This particular group in whose company I met him were apt to be learned too. Those were the days when a man going on a long train journey would be apt to slip in his pocket a copy of the Iliad in the Greek text: and there was after all Lionel Johnson's definition of a gentleman—a man who knows Greek and Latin. His lecture would, at that period, have introduced a much needed discipline into English literary Culture—which has in fact been demonstrated by his great ultimate influence, by Mr. Eliot's and that of others. As to learning, those possessing it usually did nothing with it, and he showed them its uses. But Pound arrived as an unassimilable and aggressive stranger; with his Imagism he became aesthetically a troublesome rebel.
It was not the fault of England nor was it his, but I hope I sha
ll not seem sensational if I say that looking back I cannot see him stopping here very long without some such go-between as Ford Madox Hueffer.
He writes of England, in 'Pavannes and Divisions' (1918):
In a country in love with amateurs, in a country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners and personalities so fragile and charming, that one can not bear to injure their feelings by the introduction of competent criticism, it is well that one man should have a vision of perfection and that he should be sick to death and disconsolate because he can not attain it.
Although my feelings with regard to the Englishman are as different as possible from those of Pound, nevertheless I would endorse everything he says above as to their cultural delinquencies.
Professionalism even as long ago as Congreve (and that in spite of recent laughable attempts of whitewashing) was looked upon in England as something to shun and to disown. With the passage of time people have not grown less snobbish. Indeed, every decade seems to mark an advance upon the last in that respect.
The word perfection (the key word in the above quotation) has obvious professional associations. Perfection implies the highly finished product, result of competent craftsmanship, and consequently it is taboo in a society where a well-to-do class desire the fruits of craftsmanship without its toils, or in one where time is denied the workman, and what is done can only be fragmentary, superficial, hasty, in-the-rough. 'It is impossible,' wrote Pound ('Pavannes'), to talk about perfection without getting yourself much disliked. It is even more difficult in a capital where everybody's Aunt Lucy or Uncle George has written something or other.'—He recognized, as you see, that nowhere does it make things more comfortable to talk about perfection.
Pound did not remain the post-graduate figure of the first days. By the time of 'Pavannes' (1918) he had married, acquired a beard, grown into a sort of prickly, aloof, rebel mandarin—as it would be viewed by the world. He now knew his England very well without ever really having come to terms with it. After the First World War he suddenly departed, never to return.
Paris was Pound's next stopping place, in the long exile, after he had found that he was after all too American, or something, to dwell with people 'still dominated by an Eighteenth century verbalism'—exponents of 'the opalescent word, the rhetorical tradition'. Retrospectively I am only astonished at his Kensington life enduring as it did, at the foot of what he describes as 'Rotting Hill'.
First sight of him in his Paris studio for me was a great change from the dark Kensington quarters. Having found his abode, I rang the bell. A good deal of noise was to be heard but no one answered: therefore I pushed the door, which opened practically into the studio. A splendidly built young man, stripped to the waist, and with a torso of dazzling white, was standing not far from me. He was tall, handsome, and serene, and was repelling with his boxing gloves a hectic assualt of Ezra's. After a final swing at the dazzling solar plexus Pound fell back upon his settee. The young man was Hemingway. Pound got on like a house on fire with this particular statue. There is logic in that too.—He was much more in his element in Paris. I actually believe he cooked better in Paris than he did in London—and like Sickert he is an excellent cook.
My remarks so far have not so much been aimed at estimating the value of Pound's stay in England—to himself or to the Englanders—as to bringing out something about him of primary significance where his personality is concerned. It is this: Pound is—was always, is, must always remain, violently American. Tom Sawyer is somewhere in his gait, the 'Leaves of Grass' survive as a manly candour in his broad and bearded face: the 'tough guy' that has made Hemingway famous, and the 'strenuousness' of him of the Big Stick, are modes of the American ethos with which Pound is perfectly in tune. The Good, bad, and indifferent in Americanism all goes in, to make the perfect specimen—where that is concerned it would be impossible to be more unselective. He exercises a sort of tribal attraction for his fellow-countrymen, over and above the effect of the glamour of his poetic genius. In his present great misfortune the sympathy has been markedly spontaneous. I suggest that the spectacle of a great American in eclipse in this way has an effect beyond the question of the welfare of American Letters.
Pound's nearest American analogue in the past is not Whitman, however, or Mark Twain, but a painter, James McNeil Whistler—the 'gentle master of all that is flippant and fine in art'. Whistler signed his pictures with a butterfly. Indeed their delicacy would not admit of the intrusion of the customary extrovert clodhopping calligraphy in the lower right hand corner, where the authorship of the work is proclaimed. Only by the unobtrusive presence of this winged insect was the artist's identity revealed. Like Pound in the literary art, it was in the extreme-orient that Whistler had discovered the fundamental adjustments of his preference. But what I would say here is how strangely in contradiction American 'toughness' and so much that is American is to the Butterfly—taking that as symbol.
Two of the most famous pictures of the last century, the Portraits of Thomas Carlyle and the Mother, were of course Whistler's. That Pound was conscious of affinity is suggested by the frontispiece to 'Pavannes and Divisions', in which he is posed in raking silhouette, his overcoat trailing in reminiscence of the Carlyle (though with swagger and rhetoric). But being an interloping American—like 'Jimmie' before him— aggressing among the sleepy islanders, ramming novelties down their expostulating throats—and so on—it would be the 'gentle master' at the easel (a 'Bowery tough' according to his disciple, Sickert, in conversation with me—tough in defence of his most gentle and defenceless art) rather than the sitter of whom Pound would be thinking: the author of 'The Gentle Art of Making Enemies', not the old sage responsible for 'Latter Day Pamphlets'.
We heard Pound just now allude to perfection, where he was speaking of the cult of the incompetent, which he encountered in England. And among artists of the modern age—since the time of the 'old masters' that is—there have been very few indeed who attempted perfection as did Whistler, or, I may add, attained it. Whether Pound himself, in his department of the arts, has compassed perfection in the same massive proportions will be decided I suppose in the end, one way or the other, by the 'cantos'. But certainly he has been bitten by the same inexorable bug, strained fanatically towards the same limits of human expression.
As to his present predicament, as a martyr of 'credit' economics, at least one knows (irrespective of one's personal opinion regarding those economics, and although it is small consolation for one of his oldest friends) that Pound is sincere. Once, in a moment of impatience, I used the word 'simpleton': and—in addition to everything else—I am again impatient. Of course he is not that. But he demands perfection in action, as well as in art. He even appears to expect perfection, or what he understands as such, in the world of politics.
Economist Pound certainly is immeasurably more sophisticated than William Jennings Bryan, we know that: nor has any such electrifying cry came from him as—'Thou shalt not crncify mankind upon a Cross of Gold!' But with him Gold is a great bugbear too. Half a century has elapsed, the Problem has changed : with the contemporary prophet 'gold' would not be the magic word so much as 'debt'—and with debt, Usury. The universal slavery of Debt, rather than mankind's crucifixion by means of Gold, is the burden of the modern economist's jeremiad. Usury (usuria—usura) sometimes in one tongue, sometimes another, dominates Ezra's incantation.
with usura
no picture is made to endure nor to live with
but is made to sell and sell quickly
with usura, sin against nature,
is thy bread ever more of stale rags
is thy bread as dry as paper,
with no mountain wheat, no strong flour
with usura the line grows thick
with usura is no clear demarcation
and no man can find site for his dwelling.
Stone cutter is kept from his stone
weaver is kept from his loom
WITH USURA
&n
bsp; wool comes not to market
sheep bringeth no gain with usura
Usura is a murrain, usura
blunteth the needle in the main's hand
and stopped the spinner's cunning.
That is from Canto XLV. Usury is everywhere, as a pervasive rot, such is the teaching. If that is the sinister picture arrived at by this analytic intelligence—even though you must regard it as mistaken or perverse—and actions engaged in by him must be of an extremely different order from those undertaken by politicians.
In his attitude towards other people's work Pound has been superlatively generous. That is the most spectacular instance of the dynamic role of his critical sympathy: in every fact a creative sympathy. It extends far and wide. He does not in -the least mind of being in service to somebody (as do other people it is usually found) if they have great talent. No envy of the individual is attached to the work. I have never known a person less troubled with personal feelings. This probably it is that has helped to make Pound that odd figure—the great poet and the great impresario at one and the same time. Also, he is the born teacher; and by his influence, direct and indirect, he has brought about profound changes in our literary techniques and criticism : changes, in both cases, for the better.
I consider that my second introduction has been effected. The wedge formed by Hart Street and Holborn, where they run into each other and from New Oxford Street, was occupied by the Vienna Cafe tottered and fell. For it was staffed and owned entirely by German or Austrians, 'alien enemies'. It could not have survived under all-British management. So it became a Bank. On the first floor was a large triangular room, with the mirrored ceiling, which reflected all your actions as if in a lake suspended above your head, surface downwards, and at a couple of tables, on the south side, these miscellaneous people would meet. It was a good club, and it was the only club of that sort in London.
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